It was sung. The Metaverse disaster culminates with the official closure of Horizon Worlds on June 15. Meta’s virtual reality social network was key to the transition to another of those technologies that marketing assured was going to “change the world” and has ended up throwing away 80,000 million dollars.
On the community blog, Meta announced that the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from the Quest store at the end of March and will be completely removed from the VR ecosystem on June 15. After that date, it will only be available as a standalone mobile app.
The company is trying to sell the fiasco as best it can: “We are separating the two platforms so that each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience”.
The change in Horizon Worlds, which was once a fundamental part of the company’s commitment to virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta lays off more than 1,000 Reality Labs employeesthe unit responsible for the metaverse. The January cuts at Reality Labs also affected studios working on virtual reality titles, including Ouro Interactive, an internal studio that debuted in 2023 to create its own content for Horizon Worlds.
The Metaverse Disaster
When Meta changed its Facebook name in October 2021 to try to forget the scandals that plagued it and consolidate its transition to the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg called it the next frontier. “Our hope is that, in the next decade, the metaverse will reach one billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and create jobs for millions of creators and developers.”the executive wrote at that time.
Horizon Worlds struggled to find users as the general public remained skeptical of virtual reality. The bet was expensive. The Reality Labs unit posted multibillion-dollar losses every quarter after its launch. In fourth-quarter results released in January, the unit reported an operating loss of $6.02 billion. Meta has since pivoted strategy toward artificial intelligence, reducing its previously prominent focus on virtual reality.
After confirming the fiasco, Meta will focus on VR hardware and AI. The Meta Quest 3 is – in our opinion – the most interesting device of its type on the market in terms of performance/Price and one of the very few that has achieved reasonable sales figures in a virtual reality market that has never achieved what they promised.
Zuckerberg was always involved in more promises than realities, the biggest one being that these shared virtual worlds were going to become the next great communication platform on a global scale. World Wide Web and potentially “they would end the Internet”. The hype lasted just minutes… almost before Zuckerberg finished the presentation conference. The Metaverse disaster was a foregone conclusion and now it is made official with the closure of Horizon Worlds and 80 billion dollars spent on the adventure.
